How_to_ride

Getting Started
First, try a gentle slope with no turns. Bend your knees and gently bring your body weight forward, and you should start moving. DO NOT TENSE UP. I don't know how much I can stress that!! Keep those knees bent and let them (and the suspension) ride up the bumps.

Turning
Ever snowboaded, skate boarded or wake boarded? It's all about placing your body weight, and if you've ever had a go at any of those, sports you'll know what I'm talking about and probably wont even have to read this!
There are two types of turn,frontside and backside.
To do a frontside turn, you need to bend your knees and lean fowards over the board, putting your weight in to the bindings. Don't lean over to far or you'll fall off, but don't try and counter the turn either. Don't worry, it may sound complicated but it's not!!
A backside is a bit more difficult. Firstly, you dont want to bend your knees too much, or you wont turn. You have to lean over backwards and let your weight pull you round. This is a bit harder to master than the frontside, but is still aint anyting near difficult.

Stopping.
Now this is a bit more difficult (unless of course you've got a brake kit fitted.) If you've got plenty of room, then all you have to do is turn back up hill. However, that can sometimes be difficult. If you have'nt got much room, you'll need need to do a power-turn. Its best to do this on a backside turn. To do it you need to bend down low and take a hold of your board between your legs. You then pull back and up with your hands while at the same time leaning your weight back over the edge of the board. If you do it right, the board will go into a controled slide and stop quickly. If you dont pull hard enough, it won't slide. If you pull to hard you'll tip the board up and roll down the hill, probably ending up i a thorn bush.
Once you get good at it, you'll find you will be able to pull your board round a full 180 degrees and then pull yourself back up again and keep on going, having stopped but never come off the board!

Speed control.
Controlling the speed of the board is a vital skill in mountainboarding, and it must be mastered if you want to have (some) chance of survival! Unless you've got a large amount of space, the only way to slow down is with a brake kit. (You could do a power slide but it's risky) However if you're boarding down a wide area of land you can carve. This involves boarding across the slope, not straight down it. All you have to do is turn gently about 70 degrees and ride across, then turn back and ride back across the slope. Thus you zig zag down the course. If you find it to slow, you can angle the board so you are riding down more steeply, or if you find it to fast, you can start to ride even more horizontally. If you need to slow down quickly (i.e if you suddenly ride into a short but wide open space ) you can turn sharply back up the hill and slow down.

Stability
When you start to get up to high speeds on the board, you'll find it becomes increasingly unstable. It will seem as though the slightest movement of the body makes the board turn very quickly. It will also seem that the board gets lighter and lighter to turn. To explain how this happens, here's an example:
Say you wanted to do a 90 degree turn at 5mph. You could turn that distance gently in about 5 metres and about 5 seconds. However if you were travelling at 25mph you would still turn in about 5 metres but it would only take you about 1 second. This would make it seem as though you were turning 5 times as sharply, and thus it may well throw you off balance. The way to combat this is to keep you're knees bent and stay as still as possable on the board. But most importantly you must be expecting it so you dont freak if it happens. You could fit you're boards with high speed washers/springs, and this would also help make it a lot more stable at speed.